Duty (Ablaze)
by WET NOODLES
Summary: On the night of Lucina's enthronement, Severa starts feeling maudlin.


For a couple prompts on the Tumblr kink meme: "Severa eating Lucina out on her throne of the Exalt" and "Severa/Lucina, devotion". I had to get back into the groove of doing FE stuff somehow, and I'm so so sorry it had to happen this way.

* * *

Severa wondered if she was inadvertently honoring some bygone custom of the dead Ylissean royalty, standing vigil over the Exalt's bedchambers as a skittish little handmaiden stripped her down to the smallclothes. Did Sir Frederick resent the duty? Throw all of his being into it, with the same perverse zeal that bards sung of to this day?

… Do they ever sing of her?

(Of course they did.)

 _("Hot in the armor and cool in the bed, dear gods deliver me her Lady instead!")_

Severa's attention wandered from the orange blossoms sewn into the train of the Lucina's gown, to the flash of bare shoulder as an attendant fitted her sleeve, before settling on the loosened knots of the Exalt's bodice. Severa's lips felt suddenly dry, and she ran her tongue over them while the handmaid fussed with the dark veil of hair that hindered her work.

"I can scarcely breathe in this, much less bow—or…" Lucina winced as the handmaid gave a sharp tug to the laces of her vest. "Or dance."

The girl backed away and gave a contrite little bow, her eyes wet and plaintive like a dog's.

"Forgive me, Your Grace. I know such formalities may seem… trivial, in wake of our recent stroke of misfortune…"

Severa's jaw set; she would help Lucina into her robes a thousand times over before suffering any more "sympathy" from some courtier's second-niece-in-law. The girl spoke as if they were coming out of a bad crop season—like the shock of it all hadn't quite yet settled, or like they could all afford to hide behind all this routine and ritual like a child cowering behind her mother's skirts.

"It isn't that at all," said Lucina, her eyes cast downward as she fingered the silk of her mantle. "I am not troubled by the ceremony so much as my ignorance."

Her eyes went to Severa's, though she wasn't expected to offer any words of comfort as a bodyguard on duty.

"There's been so little cause to observe these matters that I'm afraid I've forgotten what it's like. Father didn't live to see his enthronement… and Exalt Emmeryn's was before my time. I've danced perhaps twice in my life, and that had been before an audience of one. I fear war has hardened me."

Though her words grew thick, Lucina stopped herself there, for the handmaid's sake. In that short silence that followed, the waif of a girl combed her fingers through the Exalt's hair in what looked like a nervous habit, before venturing some words of encouragement.

"That—the dancing part is simple enough," she started, brushing back a wisp of Lucina's hair as they all studied her in the tall bower mirror. "You must be bold, but always humble. Never decline your hand without good reason, but you oughtn't allow any man an excess of three dances… that is, if he is not your husband.

"Above all, remember your place in gentle company. You are your people's keeper, and may the gods have mercy on the souls that forget it."

If there was any single piece of advice Lucina should have taken that night, it was that. Severa did her part to bolster the Exalt's flagging confidence, waving off the stray housekeepers that crossed their paths during their long procession down the palace halls, where Severa had to trot to meet her companion's long strides. The walk was otherwise steeped in an uncomfortable silence, unlike the many other times Severa had escorted her from one function to another, white wings reeling on high, Lucina pressed into her back. … Indeed, she much preferred to travel by pegasus, these days.

They'd exchanged a final look before Lucina passed the doors leading into the grand foyer, and the Exalt had been the one to seize this rare moment of privacy, catching Severa's wrist and drawing it to her lips. Lucina's breath trembled quietly against her knuckles; Severa's delayed response was to wrench her hand away.

"What the hell are you doing?!" she sputtered, checking back to make sure no passing servant had overheard her.

"Forgive me. I suppose I was trying to calm my nerves, and… er…" Lucina's eyes fell to the floor between them. "Do you not like it?"

"No! I mean, yes, I do, but l-look, there's a time and place for everything, okay? What if we weren't alone?"

At this, Lucina was the one to look down the deserted corridor, in the way a mother might check for monsters behind her child's coat rack.

"Right," she breathed, and Severa wished more than anything else to turn back time and reverse those words. "Thank you, Severa. Wish me luck."

"Yeah. Though it's not like you'll need it." Severa flashed a weak grin in what was meant to be taken as encouragement—but Lucina returned it with the thinnest of smiles, and they parted before Severa could act on the immediate impulse to grab Lucina's wrist and kiss it back. They instead parted on that painful note; Severa turned the scene over again and again in her mind as she trudged her way to her post, hot with shame. Some aide-de-camp she was turning out to be.

The Exalt's gown trained behind her like a comet's streak in a dimly-lit night. Severa blinked away the phantoms of a battle long passed, the angry red of Lucina's cape lashing with each arc of the Falchion's edge. She carved through the throngs of dancers with the same precision and surety that felled the waves of Risen pouring into these very same halls, and no one else in the room adorned themselves so brilliantly, or carried themselves with such dignity, or surveyed the shapeless masses with such a clarity in their eyes as Lucina. Her gaze did not lower, or stray to the walls for reassurance—which was the last thing Severa wanted anyway, because she wasn't quite ready to face Lucina again after completely bungling their last moment alone. It wasn't as though Lucina _needed_ her, or anything like that.

Severa's grip tightened over the shaft of her spear when a foreign dignitary—Plegian, cloaked and masked in deep, regal velvet, a distant cousin to the Mad King freshly ennobled by his death—asked for Lucina's hand in a dance. And then when that song came to an end, he asked her again. And again. And then a fourth time, which was surely overstepping his boundaries as some nameless upstart foreigner.

Did he have some sort of designs for him and pretty, young, naïve Exalt Lucina that night? Did he really think he stood a chance?!

… Did the bards ever make songs about him?!

 _("For all his princely wits and wiles, masks are two years out of style."_ That wasn't too hard—Severa could practically write these on the spot.)

"You know, I don't like the looks of that guy either!"

Severa nearly started out of her greaves with a yelp, and Yarne put a spear's length between them before he could be impaled.

"What the hell, Yarne?!"

"Sorry, sorry! Uh, did I startle you?"

"Did you startle—ugh." Severa threw a glance across the hall for the inevitable curiosity her outburst might have drawn. A passing dancer, caught mid-stare, sheepishly returned to her conversation.

"Maybe _say_ something before you sidle up like a weirdo next time? Gods, we need to get you a bell or something."

She sniffed in a last-ditch effort to smooth down the frays of her composure, and gave Yarne a disdainful once-over.

"… And what are you even wearing?"

Yarne shushed her, pulling the floppy brim of his hat snug against his cheeks.

"It's for my ears, okay? I'm trying to keep it on the down low tonight."

After practically twisting Laurent's arm to ditch his hat for the night, it seemed unfair to let Yarne parade around in such a ridiculous ensemble. They hadn't agreed on replacing the last court jester just yet.

"It looks someone stuck some peacock feathers in a milkmaid's bonnet," she said.

It looked like something Lucina might have purchased in one of her rare flights of fancy, like the morning they had gone out to the market to survey the reconstruction efforts. Blotting the image from her mind, Severa continued, "You've got hiding in plain sight down to an art, anyway. It's just that your 'disguise' sticks out like a sore back."

"A what now?"

"You'll attract even _more_ attention, dumbass!"

This time, more than a few guests paused to note the commotion. Severa returned their attention with a threatening glower.

"Whoa, you're really on edge tonight." A broad, hairy hand hovered a hairsbreadth over her shoulder, but Yarne knew better than to touch right now. "Sorry for bothering you."

But when Severa thought he might use that as an easy out, like a _smart_ prey animal, Yarne continued.

"But seriously, those conservationists are nuts! They're not even good-crazy like Nah's fanatics. It's like one flash of ear or tail and they're on me like scenthounds!"

 _Good-crazy_. Yarne had a point about the Voice's devotees… though the marble statues they'd erected in the Twelve Heroes' images were a little overkill. And even as a statue, Severa wore a constant frown. Now self-conscious for no good reason, she willed the furrows in her brow to relax a little.

"You mean sighthounds," she said, quieter. "Anybody with a working nose can pick up your funk."

"Hey! That's a hurtful stereotype, you know."

Ignoring him, Severa scanned the crowds for the crest of the Exalt's coronal disk. She'd always found the headgear impractical and probably more than a little unwieldy, but to a bodyguard—or a bowman picking out easy targets—it was a godsend. The dancers swept into their bows and allowed for the next wave of applause to usher in another song. The musicians resumed with a somber, stately pavane. The Plegian dignitary extended his hand for Lucina to accept; he would not relinquish his quarry just yet. Severa's grip tightened hard enough over her lance to break a nail, and as disgusted with herself as she felt just then, she used this opportunity to indulge old habits, chewing the others down to match its blunted length. Her eyes flickered up from her task to the Plegian's beast of a guardsman, whose beady eyes shimmered through his dark cowl, scanning the dancing crowd like an eagle hunting for field mice. Severa had joined Gerome to oversee him as he stripped himself of his pack and weapons, left with the rest of the Plegian's entourage to mull sullenly around the gates, but they had been foolish to grant him entrance, dressed as he was—all black from head to toe, save for the narrow slits for eyeholes.

It almost reminded Severa of a Revenant.

"But yeah…" Yarne spoke up again, after a length of silence. "Something feels 'off' about them. It's hard to describe—almost like a smell?"

"The Plegians?" Severa tossed him a sidelong grin. "Sounds like someone's stereotyping."

Despite her best efforts to hold her smile, her face fell. "Yeah, well. Lucina's a good judge of character—better than the last Exalt. It's diplomacy, Yarne. Nah has her little cult, you have the conservationists, and Lucina… has guys like these. Someone's got to make nice, pull us all together. Gods know I wouldn't leave it to any other noble in this room."

The more she turned it over in her head, the less certain she felt about her own words. She needed a drink, desperately. Maybe a step outside. The stench of a thousand fragrances warring for dominance, the squeals of violin bows drawn against catgut strings, the heat of a crowd pressed into the walls—it was all becoming too much for Severa to bear.

"Argh, it isn't that either!" Yarne bit down on a taut, brown knuckle, ostensibly deep in thought. "I-I don't mean what you just said, but the thing before that. Seriously, why the mask?"

At the far corner of the room, the Plegian leaned in to whisper something to Lucina mid-dance and she… was she laughing? If Yarne's ears were good for anything but looking cute and pitiful, maybe he could have listened in from their little confab, but that would be _too_ helpful.

She realized how desperately she needed the fresh air now, and why. She recognized her own anxiety for what it was, though she always hated to examine it this closely. She was losing sight of her own station. Lucina had duties to fulfill as Exalt. There were customs to observe, and—however distant and incredible the idea seemed—heirs to sire. Just as Severa was bound to her duties as commander, and Severa's mother to her duties as knight… and so on.

As if Severa and her mother were anything alike. Things were _different_ between her and Lucina. There had been no fanfare, no bouquets or cakes or courtship; she hadn't prepared any oaths of devotion or sweeping declarations of her unbridled passion. There'd been little more than a few hurried words exchanged on the eve of Grima's vanquish, and they did as any two youths would have done on the brink of an uncertain future. A pledge of fealty, a knighting ceremony held in Lucina's tent, a consummation more urgent and crude than those stupid books had ever made it out to be.

But Lucina would never make false promises, and Severa would never cling to false hopes, or the silly notion that this "arrangement" of theirs would defy certain abiding courtly tradition. Silly, false, girlish, stupid hopes—that's what got Mother killed.

When the music took on a shade livelier beat, the Plegian wheedled another dance out of Lucina, and Severa figured Yarne would keep an eye on things while she abandoned her post to go gag somewhere. Just as she turned to leave, hands too small to belong to Yarne clasped her shoulder and she was roughly spun around.

"A pretty girl like you has no business sulking in the wings."

Inigo caught her lance before she could box him with the shaft, so she went for a hard shove to his chest.

"A-actually!" she sputtered, lunging impotently for her own weapon, "That's _exactly_ my business here! Palace guards don't get the luxury of horsing around—and… and..."

Tossing the lance off to a befuddled Yarne, Inigo swooped to take her wrist before Severa could snatch it back.

"And if I had it my way, neither would Shepherds!"

"Come now, not one dance? A knight's still got to practice her footwork every once in a while."

"You'd better wipe that smug grin off your face," growled Severa, begrudgingly following Inigo's mincing pace. "Or it'll be the first thing the cadets see tomorrow when I put your—"

She nearly lost her balance as a dancer jostled into her shoulder, and Inigo drew her back upright.

"—head on a pike in the middle of the training grounds!"

"Smiling, surrounded by beautiful women… that doesn't sound like a bad way to be remembered."

His expression was gentle as he guided her steps to match the slower tempo. It was rote enough for Severa to follow without having to focus too hard, and though she hated to admit it, Inigo was a good deal better company than her own stupid thoughts.

At length, she asked, "I thought you were supposed to take the stage with Brady and the others?"

Inigo took a moment to respond; a prettier girl across the room must have caught his eye.

"Hm? Oh, I was. I've a pretty important post, myself." He had to look down his chin to meet Severa's eyes, and though she'd never counted her stature among her many shortcomings, she wondered then if it would have been better to inherit her mother's willowy, graceful form. "Though I've been tasked with an assignment of much greater import. It's just a matter of getting into position..."

His attention wandered, again, somewhere above Severa's head. _Of course._ He must've spied her moping from afar, took it upon himself to deal a blow to Severa the Contrary's interminable scowl, and then realized the futility of his efforts.

 _If you want to dance with a glorified porter, Gerome's over there_ , Severa nearly said, before thinking the better of taking her frustrations out on Inigo. They'd had enough time during the war to make punching bags out of each other. Her gaze dropped to their feet, and she sighed.

"Look, Inigo, I appreciate the sentiment, but—"

"Mind if I cut in?"

She startled as Inigo locked her into step with him, thrumming with the dormant energy of a violin's long, wailing vibrato that prefaced a more urgent rhythm. She felt a grip on her shoulders as he shoved her away, catching Lucina between them in one fluid, chaotic motion.

"Could the Exalt spare a dance for a humble servant?"

"Inigo?" Lucina looked about as confused as Severa felt.

" _Inigo_? Wh—hey, wait up a minute!"

Before Severa could fully gather her wits, she could make out the whisper of rich fabric as a shapeless figure draw up beside her.

"It seems we've both been thwarted by the village wag," came a low, sonorous rumble. She spun to meet the Plegian, looming over her with a wry quirk of his lip. The hand he extended was massive, gloved in smooth, unblemished kidskin, and carried one of those distinct scents worn by the Plegian gentry—an odd blend of sweet wine and desert rose.

With Inigo and Lucina nowhere in sight, she dumbly accepted.

"Unlike the young man just now, I'd be loathe to interrupt a lady's prior engagement," he said, and a single well-groom eyebrow arched above the mask. "I do hope I'm not keeping you from your post."

Despite the mask, Severa could feel the heat of his gaze sweep over the planes of her riding armor and the loose-fitting garment underneath.

"I guess neither one of us is really dressed for the occasion, huh?" She put every ounce of restraint into her words, yet they still forced through the set of her jaw. She had the faintest idea of what Inigo had set out to accomplish with his mischief. Rope her into some misguided conspiracy to piss off a foreign dignitary—because what? He's a creep? Nice strategy, idiots. Inigo could be the next court tactician, if that hasn't already proven a universally awful idea.

Severa might have been losing herself to fatigue. These boots were worn thin and her soles aching, and she would have rather endured the monotony of hotly detesting this man from afar before accepting a dance from him. From a dim corner of her peripheral vision, she felt the Plegian guardsman's eyes fall to her as his master's hand came around her shoulder. If she didn't take the task of damage control on for herself, then nobody would. She could test her feminine wiles—those hadn't seen much use since the fighting all began. Give him someone other than the freshly-enthroned Exalt to monopolize. Hold fast for the evening. She let him raise her hand like a lever, clasped to his, the handmaid's earlier advice a murmur at the back of her mind.

* * *

It came as an immense relief when she heard that the Exalt had retired early, though Severa hated herself for losing track of her charge's movements—however noble and loyal her friends' intentions. She fell into the comfortable rhythm of her duties when Cynthia came upon one of her subordinates and a footman in drunken embrace, and left it to Severa to handle the fallout.

Severa tilted the flask in her hand, listening for the sloshing remains of drink, and after a painful length of silence, took a sip. The unit looked on, numb with fear and expert stillness, except for the culprit, who self-consciously adjusted her stance. Severa rolled the wine in her mouth, viscous against her tongue. She took in the flavor for another moment, and then swallowed.

"Wow. Your boyfriend's got pretty expensive tastes. You know that?"

The throne room was empty as she passed over the ranks, stopping before another soldier, a tall, gangling youth. She fixed her gazed above Severa's head; when she held the lip of the flask up to the girl's mouth, she felt no breath against her hand.

"No? Not even a whiff? Whatever, I guess. More for me."

She returned the stopper to the flask and considered it for a moment.

"It almost looks like he sneaked a little from the castle cellar, huh? You're pretty lucky that—hey, you look at me when I'm talking!"

It must've been an absurd sight to an outsider, a stubby little captain gripping a subordinate by the chin and forcing them eye-to-eye. Severa had long since resigned to that quirk of her image; her wits and words were more enough to command the respect of a gaggle of teenage girls. It didn't hurt that, by pure coincidence, her pegasus mount happened to be the tallest of any knight's.

"I was _saying_ that you're lucky to have stolen from Exalt Lucina and not her grandfather, unless you _want_ me to sit you on a sword, point up, while you watch your sweetheart hauled around Ylisstol by his toes and quartered over the town square. Is that what you want?!"

The girl tried to shake her head, but didn't dare break out of Severa's hold. Eventually, Severa slackened her fingers, and the soldier's tears came freely.

"Ugh, you reek. I was going to post you out at the gate, but that just gives you a chance to screw the rest of us over." She groaned and turned away—as loathe as she was to let an idler go unpunished, Severa could hardly stand the sight of a young girl crying.

"One of you take her to bed. I'll deal with her in the morning."

"That won't be necessary."

The hall echoed with the clapping of boots against stone as the unit stood to attention. Severa briefly considered slugging the rest of the wine then and there before the entire division and their league—but she restrained herself, and faced Lucina instead. Lucina's hair had been freed from their earlier bindings, and she wore the simple, pale frock that Severa had grown used to seeing her wear around the palace.

"You have my pardon," Lucina said, with the placid mask she so often wore to address her less familiar retainers. "While sharp, your commander's words are sound… but we can spare such frivolities during times of celebration."

She looked to Severa, who had until then been avoiding the eye-contact. In an unconvincing display of chagrin, she huffed and waved them away.

"Did you not hear your Exalt? You're dismissed! Get out of here!"

They saluted—including the girl who had moments ago been weeping into her riding gloves—and cleared from the hall. Severa saw them off with a scowl, imagined it burning on the backs of their head, and stubbornly refused to break her streak of avoidance with Lucina.

"You're free to go as well, Severa. I'm going to stay here a while."

For all the grief she endured from trying to read Lucina from afar, it was amazing how obviously the princess's tone betrayed her intentions. The words were carefully chosen—and of course Lucina wasn't going to invite her to bed tonight. Not after their last exchange.

Severa glanced down at the flask in her hand.

"Maybe in a bit. I might have a nightcap first. And besides..." She took up her lance, since retrieved from the wall where Yarne had left it, and forced a smirk. "I can't leave you roaming around the halls at night like this."

Lucina returned a faint smile.

"You have my thanks. I doubt it would be necessary, but I won't deny the small comforts your protection brings."

Lucina had to know what she was doing to her—how Severa's chest twinged a little, pathetically, with pride at that. How she basked in small scraps of praise like these, her feet light as they crossed the hall within a short arm's reach of each other, the misery of her evening nearly forgotten. Lucina's face fell as she stopped before the throne, and there was their reminder.

 _Gods._ There was that nagging voice again, low and rueful. _You're no better than a dog._ _A tiny one too, like one of those yappy_ _mutts_ _._

"… I'm sorry to have undermined your station, if I did," Lucina finally spoke up. "I'd hoped to remove you from a difficult situation, but my involvement may have caused even more of an upset."

Her gaze was fixed on the seat, tall and silent and unadorned, and she said no more. Severa watched her fingers ghost where the Falchion's hilt would have rested—where her hand, from years of habit, would have come to perch.

At length, Severa responded: "Well, _someone_ has to."

Her voice carried unnaturally far in the throne room, and it unnerved her, and when Severa was unnerved, she tended to keep talking.

"It's not that I like being the bad guy," she went on. "But it's not like you can afford to, with everything in shambles like it is. You were—I mean, you still are a symbol. A paragon of virtue. It's not your job to, you know, knock a few idiot heads around."

She watched Lucina's chest swell and fall in a quiet sigh, before taking her seat on the throne.

"Exalt Emmeryn was a symbol," she said absently, as though pondering aloud before an audience of no one. "As was my father, for a short time. I wonder if they would have sagged beneath the weight of their crown, had they lived to see the end of this war."

It was tempting to use this opportunity to commiserate—to tell Lucina that she knew the feeling, dwarfed in the enormous shadows of their predecessors. Maybe it would have distracted Lucina from her own frustrations. Maybe it would have seemed tacky. Severa was relieved when Lucina continued, finally addressing her:

"It's the Exalt's responsibility to dole out punishments where they are due. It's unfair of me to shift that burden onto my friends—but if I've learned anything from tonight, it's that I'm woefully ill-equipped for politics."

The Plegian, the mask, the guardsman, the dark robes—the images needled at Severa like a bad itch beneath her armor. Lucina's smile was wry.

"It may take years, if not decades, to heal the scars between our nations, but… I wasn't prepared for this. All my worries began and ended with Grima. My father was meant to take over the throne when this all was over—he wasn't meant to die when he did, and I..."

This time, Severa didn't chance a moment's hesitation. Staggering forward, she swept Lucina's hand into her own to press her lips there, over the web between her thumb and forefinger. Though Lucina seemed more startled than pleased, she did not pull her hand away.

"Severa?"

"Gods, I'm sorry about earlier, okay?" she groaned, hiding her eyes in their tangle of fingers. "I got nervous and lashed out, thinking I was protecting you—but the truth is I was just being a bad friend. Nobody has to deal with courtly bullshit alone. Nobody _can._ Not the Hero King… n-not even you."

She knelt beside the throne, Lucina's hand clasped tight between hers, her fingers warm, rough, brown, long— _stop thinking a_ _b_ _out her fingers, idiot!_

"You'll have the Shepherds. The Pegasus Knights. Advisers. Like, politics are almost like a battlefield. There's tactics, and… argh, I'm awful at this." Daddy was so much better at bullshitting these "rousing speeches". Severa wondered, with a twinge of guilt, what Morgan would have said in her place. What the Plegian noble would have said to console Lucina, and done to Lucina, in this position. Her face hardened as she tried to blot the memories away, carefully smoothing her palm against the soft fabric of Lucina's skirt.

She settled into her crouch, unwilling to rise and face Lucina; she wished she had put that time spent on self-loathing to better use, like rehearsing this moment. It was so easy, with friends and strange men alike, to make herself plain—but sometimes with Lucina her tongue just turned to knots of fishing wire, and no amount of good breeding, or nights rooting through her father's study, could salvage her ability to form a coherent sentence.

"Sorry. I've been such an idiot tonight." Peering from the corner of her eye, she saw the flagon of wine just within arm's reach, and thought the better of retrieving it. She sighed through her nose, unfastening the buckle of one of Lucina's night shoes. She rode this impulse to its indecorous conclusion, the distant, rational corner of her mind supposing she'd debased herself enough that it wouldn't matter, and planted a kiss on her smallest toe, and then the arch, the ankle. She heard Lucina suck in a breath and felt every tendon seize in her hand—it must have felt weird, like Severa had been possessed by the spirit of a dirty old man. In Lucina's place, she would have kicked herself in the teeth.

"Hey... Is this alright?" She was muttering against the inside of Lucina's calf, skin goosed from the sudden touch. She stroked the pad of her thumb along the ridge of Lucina's knee, against the grain of the fine hairs that raised in its wake.

Lucina was silent for a time, and Severa feared the worst: that in the wake of a Risen apocalypse, their hero of the waking world found Severa _irredeemably creepy._

Finally, Lucina responded.

"If… you are alright." A dry-sounding swallow. "With this."

Severa rarely trusted her tongue or wits in these situations, so she carried her wordless trail upwards, pushing the skirt of Lucina's frock into bunches around her thighs. She sometimes liked to make a production of moistening her fingers, but the frayed edges of her nail beds felt odd against her tongue, a sharp reminder of her earlier shame. It didn't escape her how she somehow managed to pervert the inviolable dynamic between an Exalt and one of her flock, positioned how she was—knelt like a squire at her knighting, burrowing between the princess's knees as a groveling animal would. Severa reached back around, between her own legs, to attend that greedy itch, whimpering into the slick juncture of Lucina's groin and thigh. One of Lucina's legs curled around the small of Severa's back, and she liked to think of it as a possessive gesture, guarding her mistress from prying eyes as she debauched herself before the throne, her swinish cries echoing through the chiseled vaulting of the ceiling. She liked to think that between Lucina and a future suitor, he would only come as close as necessity demanded. That she would only be _my lady_ to him in private, and no words would pass between them in bed—not like Severa, not when Lucina's name reverberated from her gut to her tongue like a kickdrum, loosened whenever she groaned it out between their moistened lips: _Lucina. Lucina._

Severa liked to imagine her eyes screwed shut, her hands digging, white-knuckled, against the arms of the throne, her toes curling against the leather of the shoe Severa neglected to remove. She liked to imagine the seat soaked, dissolved with the rest of the throne room, floating in a white-hot purgatory where Lucina would be less than a Hero Queen and Severa more than her retainer and frighteningly slavish fuck, and the shame of even entertaining that fantasy was enough to quicken the hand on herself to climax. She pressed two insistent fingers against the fabric of her leggings with a cry and staggered forward to muffle her own voice. Heaving raggedly against Lucina's navel, she made to slink back down and return to her work, but a hand firm against her jaw stilled her.

"Severa."

Her name reached Severa in a breathless gasp, and when Lucina tilted her face up by the chin, Severa recognized the signs that she may have lost track of herself—the shiny flush, the dark hair, dampened and matted against Lucina's neck, her calloused thumb listlessly tracing the curve of Severa's cheek.

"That's enough," she panted. "Or—or at least slow down. Er."

"Sorry." It was an absurd response to what most people would have taken as a compliment, but Severa's tongue was too slippery against her chafed lips, and also kind of too tired, to do much more than that.

"Are you… alright?"

"Huh, yeah? I'm fine, why—hey!"

Severa made an indignant squeak as Lucina's arms fell around her, scrabbling to find her balance as she was hoisted into her lap.

"You seem troubled." Lucina's mouth was at her ear, suddenly closer than they had been all evening, and then moved to the side of her neck. "But if your plan was to create a distraction, then you've succeeded."

She hadn't thought it possible for her face to grow any hotter, and it may have spoke volumes about Severa's character that some good-natured teasing would have her more flustered than the act from just moments ago. Or maybe it was Lucina's palms, drawing a heated course down Severa's breasts and belly before stopping on the tops of her thighs, kneading the leggings tight enough that the color of her flesh pressed into view.

Atop the throne instead of prostrate before it, this all felt vaguely sacrilegious—probably passed for actual, legal desecration in the books—and never had Severa felt so comforted by her frequent lapses in faith. In a move that would almost certainly seem too forward, she slid one hand over Lucina's to guide it inwards, between her legs—

"Severa."

Lucina raised the hand between their bodies, up to her lips; they were coarse against her knuckles, like jagged fingernails gliding over her skin, but Lucina's cheek was soft, and the flicker of her eyelashes, softer. The gesture's tenderness, however well-intentioned, worried open a wound Severa had spent all evening trying to mend, and the earlier guilt came flooding back through the cracks of her prideful facade.

"Gods." It came out hoarse and croaked, and Severa willed herself to keep these last strands of composure. "I've been such an ass… more than usual. I thought apologizing for earlier meant I could get away without opening my fat mouth about it. But nothing gets past you, does it?"

Lucina's brow furrowed in both parts worry and confusion, as if Severa had just presented a riddle. And she supposed that it could have been taken as sarcasm: sometimes a lot _did_ get past her. Too eager to overlook someone's defects, like biting into an apple with a rotted core. (It would at least explain why she ever befriended Severa in the first place.)

"It's… incredible that you give me the time of day. I know I don't make the most scintillating conversationalist., and it couldn't have been _that_ g—" She stopped herself, for fear of sounding like Inigo… and with the thought of Inigo, that fire was snuffed. She would have to remember that trick next time she wanted to kill the mood. _Okay_. Her grip on her knees tightened, since she wasn't sure where else they should go while she was awkwardly straddling Ylisse's Exalt. She took a breath: third time's the charm.

"What I'm trying to say is… don't let me drag you down, alright?" Her voice took on a hardened edge, as absurd as it sounded from this position, with Lucina's fingers curled over her hips and digging through her clothes into her flank. "I thought now wouldn't be a good time for this talk but, well. Here we are!"

She steeled herself for next part, but it caught in her chest. Gods, this was pathetic.

"You deserve so much better than… well… you saw me with that trainee. Than that. Also, I've put on at least fifteen pounds since getting back to Ylissetol. And my hair is a mess, ugh." She would've commented on the state of her dress, but that was better left unsaid. "And… I've just been really selfish, alright? I can't give you an heir. All I can give you is..." The words died in her throat, and she scrubbed at her eye with the back of her sleeve to relieve the itch building there. She should have chugged the wine when she had the chance; at least then she'd have an excuse for her histrionics.

"And it's still yours—I mean I… I'm still—" She gritted her teeth, pushed through the dangerous tremor in her voice. "I'll still be yours, as long as you'll have me. I made an oath to protect you, right? Just… I don't want you to feel torn over some misplaced sense of obligation to any of..."

Severa gave a dismissive wave, before finally collapsing against Lucina's shoulders, defeated.

"… any of this. Ugh, just shut me up. Forget it."

The last bit came out of habit. Regrettably, there was no taking any of that back, unless Severa could somehow master the power of suggestion—but the power to drop dead on command would have perhaps served her better now.

She felt Lucina's hands fall away. It probably wasn't an explicit rejection, but Lucina didn't make any move to comfort her either. It was stupid of Severa to hope for anything more than that—if their duties couldn't drive them apart, then her theatrics sure picked up the slack. Severa steeled herself and made to push away, but when she lifted her head, the sight of Lucina digging down the neckline of her own frock froze her in place.

When she produced an object from the front of her gown, Severa was too dumbfounded to do anything but blurt out the first idiotic question that came to mind.

"...Where were you even keeping that?"

Lucina made a low, amused hum, but her mouth had pulled tight at the corners into a grimace. She turned the ring between her fingers, pressing her thumb into the stone's grooved setting, the halidom's seal engraved onto the surface. Severa looked from the emblem to Lucina's Mark, dark and glistening in the chamber's dying lights.

"I have a confession to make," she started, hesitating. "I fear I've made a fool out of myself countless times tonight. Eventually, all of the advice I'd received was forgotten, and never before was I so keenly aware of how much I count upon my allies. If it were not for your ingenious plan with Inigo, I would have made myself the laughingstock of many a Plegian banquets."

It dawned on Severa, belatedly, that Inigo may have used that opportunity with Lucina to more devious ends. He clearly hadn't kicked his habitual wingmanship; Severa groaned out of reflex, but Lucina seemed to mistake her displeasure for embarrassed modesty.

"In truth, I'd been meaning to hold onto this a while longer. I considered that—that you might not want to saddle yourself with further commitments beyond your post, and that I could trust us to better make such a decision in the future, once all the dust around us has settled." Her eyes fell away from Severa's, to the little marks on her finger left from the sharp grooves of the ring. "I see now that I've waited too long. There is no such future—not if I stand idly by and wait for it to come to me. Before me stands another trial… and as you said, I cannot face it alone."

With a nearly imperceptible tremor, Lucina clasped Severa's hand in hers, turning the ring over to her palm. She could barely hear the Exalt's next words with the roar of blood in her ears, too overwhelmed to do anything but dumbly hang on her every breath.

"You've been a stalwart ally, and a faithful friend. It would be unjust of me to beg anymore of you. All the same, I would ask for your hand."

The moment played out so much differently than Severa's fantasies as a girl. She was no headstrong, waggish heroine, and Lucina was no Khan trapping her in place with his ardent gaze. Even later, when she had women to occupy her thoughts—curse Kjelle and Noire's mothers and the private scenarios she would take to her grave—she had resigned to the inevitability of a tedious marriage, or spinsterhood, and took some comfort in the idea of never living to see it anyway.

She remembered that she was expected to give an answer.

"If—if I misjudged the timing..." Lucina trailed off, then started again. "I didn't mean to force a decision on you. We can discuss this another day, once both our heads are clear. Or..."

"Actually, I was thinking," Severa cut in, her courage flagging within the first few syllables. She looked away, drying her eyes with the back of her sleeve again, and then, after a self-conscious beat, using it to wipe her mouth.

"I was sort of going to wait for you to finish, and then, like… kiss you? Catch you off-guard, I guess? But then I realized it'd be a little foul, not to mention _unsanitary..._ "

Lucina's fingers curled at the nape of Severa's neck, silencing her as she brought their foreheads together. Lucina opened her mouth as if to speak, running her tongue over her lips as she deliberated over what next to say—and then laughter came instead, so clear and unguarded and ridiculous that Severa could only laugh alongside her, pressing her smile to Lucina's. Lucina hummed into the kiss, reverberating down Severa's jaw, her chest, her belly, hollowing her until she was weightless and giddy; she clutched the ring as if it were a fistful of ballast.

Severa nodded into the touch, chuckling a little ruefully into Lucina's neck, until a crash brought her scrambling to her feet.

"It's greatpox! That's what it was! _That was the smell!"_

The wide doors to the great hall were blown open behind Yarne, panting from his crouch in human form.

"Gods, the mask, the clothes, the smell—how could I have been so blind! Er, nose… blind."

"That guard of his too!" Inigo caught up with a jog. "Knowing how one even _gets_ greatpox, it doesn't leave much to the imagination what they've been up to."

"Much as I hate to say it, these couple'a clods are right. I got a good look at the guy at the hogsheads—red and bumpy all over, like you skinned a wyvern." Brady was last to reach them, nearly doubled-over from exhaustion and hanging onto his staff for support. "That's classic greatpox for ya... And, uh, in case you were wonderin', it's 'anosmia', not 'nose-blind.'"

"Thank goodness we swooped in when we… oh. Oh, gods." Inigo's face fell, and he was the first to realize the gravity of their error. "We're interrupting something. Forgive our intrusion, Your Grace. Er..."

"Yeah, I'm outta here. Night, all."

Holding his impassive scowl, Brady whirled around and left much in the way he came, with a guilty, urgent little shuffle. Inigo followed close behind. With no other targets within sight, Severa's grip tightened over the shaft of her spear, and she began her slow, stalking advance upon Yarne.

"Hm, yep, that's it for the species, Yarne! I didn't want to do this, but you're going on a spit."

Severa couldn't decide what rankled her more: Yarne's half-shrieked apology as he scrabbled up mid-shift and lopped out the door, or Lucina's fresh peals of laughter, burying her face in Severa's shoulder to muffle the noise. With the most theatrical, long-suffering sigh she could muster, Severa reached a hand over her shoulder and found the back of Lucina's head.

"Alright, come on. Let's get Her Grace to bed." Severa moved to pull away, but Lucina's arms wrapped around her midsection to hold her in place.

She tried again.

"C'mon, before the gossiping hens wander out of their hutch again."

"I could carry you, if you'd like that. Your feet haven't had a chance to rest all day."

Severa felt her face light up, and she squirmed out of the embrace.

"Don't be stupid, you'll throw your back ou-oof!" The tiled floor fell away from her as Severa was lifted into the air, and she threw her arms around Lucina's neck for purchase.

"Gods, do you ever think?!" she groaned, wriggling her hips as Lucina held her closer to her chest. "Do you have a deathwish? Is this how the Hero of Ylisse wants to make her last stand?!"

"You're not as heavy as you think." Lucina took a few steps, and then paused to readjust the arm she had slipped underneath Severa's knees. "Although this might not have been the wisest way to make my point."

"What," Severa snorted. "That you can lift a girl? Try Kjelle in her armor—that'd impress her."

Lucina was quiet a moment, with nothing but her echoing footfalls to fill the gap.

"That night, before Grima—you said you would protect me." The edges of Lucina's hair glowed a soft red in the torchlight as she made their way through the hall. "You've laid down so much of yourself to the halidom—and to me. And though it may not be my place to say so… I know that Cordelia's heart would swell with pride, could she see you now."

Severa's first instinct was to object. To roll out of Lucina's hold and hopefully land on her feet, to lash out with legs or tongue, to laugh in her Exalt's face at the notion. But she shuddered instead from the roving chill from the bare stone of the corridor, burrowing closer against her captor.

"I'd like to make an oath to you as well… not just to protect you in turn, but to somehow take those doubts you expressed and banish them from your mind. You are so much more than your—er. Did you fall asleep?"

Severa had closed her eyes, luxuriating in her trancelike weightlessness, the steady thud of Lucina's heartbeat, the sound of her voice. Willing her breaths to even out, Severa answered with a well-rehearsed sigh.

"It stands to reason," Lucina murmured. A few more steps, and a pause. "Perhaps for your ceremony, I will stand guard over you. Anything but dancing—I've had my fill of that, I think."

Severa let her jaw go slack and gave her best impression of a fluttering snore, before lolling her head to the side; she hid her smile against Lucina's breast.


End file.
